dira | some stuff

I have all these thoughts, and keep forgetting to post them. And as I may well be spending a lot of tomorrow drinking, I might as well toss out what I can remember now.

I dunno if it's a history major thing or just an anal-retentive thing, but it always catches my attention, in a peeve-y way (which is to say, I see it, sigh, and then keep going and generally love the fic anyway, and then it just niggles at my brain days or weeks later), when people neglect to take into account the fact that their fic takes place in a particular time frame. Season two Xander can't bitch about Phantom Menace ruining Star Wars, and Ray Kowalski can't spend the Quest taking personal inspiration from Eminem's "Lose Yourself." Not that I've seen any fic where that happens, and if it exists, please don't tell me.

(Due South caveat: I've seen various theories on how long RayK was partnered with Fraser - some people theorize that Season 3/4 actually covered a span of time anywhere from eight months to four years; if you're positing at the high end of that scale, then events in a mid-season or immediately post-finale fic could in fact be taking place significantly later than 1998. But it'd be nice to make some sort of reference to that fact, if you're doing it.)

One reason I was thinking about this is that I'm noodling a fic that takes place in fall of '98, and thinking about Fraser using the internet, and abruptly realized that at that time Google had been around for about a month. If that. It was sort of a startling thing to realize: these guys exist at a particular point in time (if you need visual confirmation of that fact, just look at Ray's phone. Jesus.) just as much as Starsky & Hutch or the Firefly gang.

And I'd been meaning to ask this at

ds_discourse but I'm too lazy to post twice.

Is it ever canonically established which set of grandparents Fraser grew up with? Fic seems to point unanimously to his paternal grandparents, but I'd never really been able to see Bob as the child of librarians. Also, I always thought he was significantly older than Caroline (itself probably a baseless assumption) and the odds were therefore better on her parents still being alive than his - I can see Bob coming from a long line of Mounties, dying in the traces like his father before him (though hopefully not his son and daughter after him - good long lives for Ben and Maggie, please). And if Ben was raised by his Fraser grandparents, where the hell were the Pinsents?

With apologies if this is all established in one of those Vecchio-era episodes that I swear I am going to get around to watching sooner or later.